It's been a little over a year since the Power Rangers were introduced to a brand new generation of audiences with a new origin story. However, while not a certifiable disaster, the movie certainly wasn't a hit with audiences, either, leading to a lot of questions related to whether the standalone movie could become a franchise. Then, Saban Brands broke off with Bandai, leading Hasbro to step in and take over the toy franchise. Over the past few months the company has been formulating a plan for the toy brand, and if Hasbro has its way, it looks as if there will be more movies on the way... at some point. Speaking at a conference, Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner revealed:
As I mentioned, we've now announced the acquisition of Power Rangers. This is really a great statement about where we believe we are in developing our brand blueprint. The fact that we can acquire Power Rangers brand and plug and play that right into our strategy where we activate it in entertainment, motion pictures in the future and then of course across toys and games and consumer products and do so globally. We felt the brand was very under leveraged and undervalued. We feel we can exploit it to a much greater extent and it was a great opportunity to acquire the brand.
The Power Rangers had been a Saban brand for 25 years before selling the toy rights to Hasbro. Hasbro has a long history of creating movie and TV tie-ins for its products and vice versa, so the idea that new movies could be in the pipeline is not shocking for the company to be iterating, here. However, according to what Brian Goldner said at the Hasbro Strategic Decisions conference (via Tokunation), the brand is "undervalued" and there are a lot of directions it can grow.
The films that have been made based on Hasbro products range from movies based on games (See: Clue and Dungeons & Dragons, etc) to movies based on toys (See: Transformers, G.I. Joe). Therefore, another movie would not be out of the question. Still, considering the 2017 Power Rangers movie got points for diversity but only made $142.3 million on a $100 million production budget---and those are worldwide numbers, not domestic -- it seems reasonable that the toy company might want a hard or soft reboot before it moved forward with another big screen project. The cool thing about keeping up with the current cast and format would be, honestly --and with minor spoilers-- the Power Rangers movie closed out with an end-credits scene that featured a teacher calling out the name "Tommy Oliver" in detention. That potentially sets up the introduction of the fan-favorite Green Ranger if a second movie were to be made. Skipping another origin story might be ideal, too.
Keeping all of this in mind, Hasbro is still new to the Power Rangers game, and will have plenty of stuff to deal with related to the brand in the coming months. In fact, the first line of toys isn't expected to appear until the spring of 2019. For now, Hasbro and Paramount have the Bumblebee spinoff coming, and we'll keep you posted as that flick gets closer to release date.
